How the Idea of Religious Toleration
Came to the West

Author: Perez Zagorin

Princeton University Press,
2003

Perez Zagorin lived from 1920 to April 26, 2009. Wikipedia describes him as "a world-renowned historian who specialized in 16th and 17th century English/British history and political thought, early modern European history, and related areas in literature and philosophy." From 1965 to 1990, he taught at the University of Rochester, New York.

Perez Zagorin writes of the 16th century as "probably the most intolerant
period in Christian history." In that century thousands of people were executed
as heretics. One of them was Michael Servetus, burned alive in 1553 on order
from John Calvin and city authorities for having delved into theological speculations
that deviated from what Calvin was certain was the truth.

The trial and execution of Servetus, writes Zagorin, provoked a great controversy
concerning religious toleration. It was a religious debate championed by Sebastian Castellio, a relatively unknown who in 1554 wrote a small book,
Concerning Heretics – anonymously and with false names for the printer and
the place of publication.

John Calvin's righteousness inclined him toward intense condemnation. He
called the author of Concerning Heretics that "dog. He called him a "monster" and "the worst
plague of our time" and, of course, "the chosen instrument of Satan." Calvin was not
a careful thinker: he falsely accused Castellio of endorsing all of Servetus'
teachings.

Calvin's successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, continued the attacks on Castellio,
drawing from the Bible and Christian history. According to Zagorin, Beza described
heretics as those "who, despite admonition, obstinately resisted the truth and
disrupted the peace and unity of the church with their false teaching." It is
the church, observed Beza, that decides what is heresy, not the city magistrate
who carries out the church's wishes to execute. The magistrate's duty, claimed
Beza, was to protect civil society, and he added that the only difference between
heresy and other crimes was that heresy was far more heinous.

Castellio argued that heresy was no more than a religious disagreement. "A
heretic," claimed Castellio, "is not someone whom we can say for certain is guilty
of error, and we should not silence argument by destroying books or people,
making it impossible to know their beliefs and what they have to say in their
own defense." Castellio drew from his own Christianity. He advocated charity.
Those who think themselves wiser should be more merciful, he claimed, and unity
and peace would be better served if there was more charity and forbearance.
Those who think themselves wiser, Castellio claimed, should teach by example
rather than punish by execution. Killing Servetus, claimed Castellio, was not
defending a doctrine.

There were others before Castellio opposed to the killing of heretics, and
the best known of them was Erasmus (1469? – 1536), who had had an influence
on Castellio. A devout Catholic, Erasmus proposed that it was in the interest
of the Church to tolerate different points of view and that such toleration
might produce truth. In other words, Erasmus believed in progress regarding
ideas. He believed that heresy should be combated only with spiritual weapons
so long as no crime was involved against civil peace and secular authority.

What Erasmus and Castellio were up against was the notion of the Catholic
Church and then the Protestants that they were the sole custodians of religious
truth. But it was not only church authority that favored combating heresy. Zagorin
suggests that from the 1200s into the 1600s it was supported by public opinion
-- perhaps a necessary ingredient for its occurrence.

The concept of heresy and coercion in religion had been supported by the
foremost intellectual for both Catholics and Protestants, Bishop Augustine of
Hippo. But Augustine had not advocated killing heretics. And before the 11th
century, writes Zagorin, heresy was not punished by death. The first execution
for heresy writes Zagorin, "is said to have occurred at Orleans in 1022" at
the order of the French king, Robert the Pious. In 1034 heretics were burned
to death in Italy in the diocese of Milan, and in Germany in 1051 the Holy Roman Emperor Henry
III executed heretics. Zagorin writes, "We hear of heretics being
killed by mobs." In France, he continues, "The burning of heretics became universal
during the thirteenth century and was made part of Louis IX's legislation in
1270. And in 1401 England's parliament instituted death by fire for heresy."

Fast forwarding to the 16th century, an exception to Catholicism's general
intolerance, writes Zagorin, was in Poland, where the growth of Lutheranism
and Calvinism among the nobility led several Polish kings to support coexistence
between Catholics and Protestants – in the interest no doubt of the peace and
stability that kings usually want within their realms. It was a policy that encouraged
Protestants to seek refuge and a home in Poland.

Toleration was advanced in the Netherlands in the 1600s for the purpose of
unity in a struggle against the rule of the Habsburg Spanish emperor, Philip
II – an advocacy that failed, writes Zagorin, "owing largely to the intolerance
of the Calvinists." During the conflict with the Habsburgs, Calvinists gained
control among the Dutch, and they suppressed Catholic worship, killed or expelled
Catholic clergy and took over Catholic churches while demanding freedom for
themselves. But after the Dutch won their independence from Habsburg rule their
society became known as the most tolerant and pluralistic. Calvinist leaders
combined state and church but moderated their position regarding rival theology
and strove to avoid discord within their society, deciding it would be best
that people of rival faiths live in peace. Civil accord also suited business
interests. The Dutch were growing commercially, their society having become
more wealthy and bourgeois – the bourgeoisie preferring order above everything
but income. It was another instance of change inspired not so much by people
reading the ancient Greeks but by the social dynamics of the times – not unlike
Hegel's thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Tolerance came a little later to England. Into the 1640s intolerance was
a problem among the English, not to be resolved until the end of the century.
England's Puritans were Calvinists, as were the Presbyterians and those who
broke away from the Presbyterians – the Congregationalists, or Independents,
who held that each congregation had the right to govern itself. And there
were other breakaway groups, such as the Quakers and Baptists, all at odds with
the Church of England.

Among men of faith in England was Roger Williams, who in 1644 published what
Zagorin describes as "...not only the most sweeping indictment of religious
persecution thus far written by an Englishmen, but one of the most comprehensive
justifications of religious liberty to appear during the seventeenth century."
Williams was to found the colony of Rhode Island and to have an impact on the
creation of liberty in the United States, where intolerance by Puritans was
manifest.

Zagorin writes pages on the early writings on toleration by a son of Calvinists,
England's John Locke (1632-1704), and he writes pages on the French thinker,
Pierre Bayle 1647-1706) Late in their lives, according to Zagorin,

... the fires of religious passions were slowly dying down in Europe and
the last age of faith in Western civilization springing from the Protestant
Reformation was gradually expiring. Rationalist, deist, empiricist, and skeptical
trends were making steady inroads in philosophy and theology and, together with
the beginnings of the historical criticism of the Bible, were undermining orthodox
religion and fostering free thought, indifference, and unbelief. These developments,
whose growing effects were felt chiefly among members of the educated upper
classes, intellectuals and men of letters, marked the inaugural state of the
Enlightenment in Europe, an era that proclaimed the autonomy and supremacy of
human reason.